RESEARCHING FAMILY HISTORY
It is perhaps a basic human attribute to want a feeling of ‘belonging’ or ‘place’. Studying family history can help in this respect. Long lost family members can be reunited, ties to locations strengthened and a place in history established. The dates and events of the English Civil War, and the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, and the growth of cities such as Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, become more than dry words on the page if they can be related to real people on a family tree.
There is often a tendency to consider only male ancestral lines; presumably because these are the ones that bring forward the family surnames that we are familiar with today. This is unfair as female ancestral lines contribute an equal share to our genetic make-up. The loss of the female line surnames at marriage should not reduce the desire to explore these lines of research. The affect of this approach, however, is to effectively double the number of surnames being studied with each preceding ancestral generation.
There is an obvious desire to trace each ancestral line as far back in time as possible, but the mid sixteenth century is the effective limit of most research. In addition one can attempt to trace forwards and backwards as many related family lines as possible. These lines are often only related through marriage to a sibling of an ancestor. As such they do not contribute to ones own genetic make-up, but they do often help to better understand the families place in the past.
A number of information sources are available, these will be considered in detail in later articles. They include:
